Three major marketing strategies from - Seth Godin

Seth Godin is an entrepreneur, best-selling author, and speaker who knows what it takes to succeed in business and to be your own boss. He is also very famous for his TED talks which are very interesting and highly informative. Some of his notable writings are the Purple cow, the dip and All Marketers Are Liars.

I had watched a TED talk of Seth called “ spread your ideas” and have derived three important points from that TED talk which are really important for a good marketing strategy.

Spread your idea-

Otto Frederich Rohwedder of The United States invented the first single loaf bread-slicing machine. A prototype he built in 1912 was destroyed in a fire, and it was not until 1928 that Rohwedder had a fully working machine. After he had created the machine he started supplying bread to the customers. Most of the customers did not seem to like the sliced bread idea, and it was a failure until 15 years later when the company, wonder bread started to promote the idea of sliced bread to the customers. By explaining how they are benefiting by buying sliced bread and after that it was a huge success, everyone started calling it the greatest invention of all time. Rohwedder was busy patenting the machine that he forgot to spread the idea of sliced bread. The message from Seth Godin to us through this story is that we should spread our idea.

Otto Frederich Rohwedder

This is the bread slicing machine he had invented

Think out of the box -

Frank Gehry is a Canadian- born American architect. A number of his buildings, including his private residence, have become world-renowned attractions. He is most famous for his building design's which looks kind of odd or I would say they are out of the box. He designed a museum called the Guggenheim museum of Bilbao. The museum became a worldwide attraction and by doing this he did not just change the museum, he changed the entire economy of the city, more people visited the museum and hence the other industries like travel, hotels, transport got more customers. It was a win-win situation for everyone. After the building became famous everyone started to admire his work and he soon became the most sought after architect in the world. He got all the fame because of only one reason, he did something which nobody else had the guts to do, he had different and unique ideas hence he won.

Frank Ghery

Guggenheim museum of Bilbao

Make them obsessed about your product or service -

Seth Godin tells us to add an otaku factor to our product or service. Otaku is a Japanese word that is used to define a young person who is obsessed with computers or a particular aspect of popular culture to the detriment of their social skills. People do not care about you or your product. They only care about how they benefit by using it unless you add the otaku factor to it.

Let me give you a perfect example:

We all know the famous doughnut maker - Krispy Kream, they had a great strategy to create otaku. They go to a new town, open a new store and start spreading their idea to all the people in town. Slowly the otaku builds up, soon the store will be a huge success. This was a simple strategy but it was very effective.

In the Krispy Kream example we can see that they had all the three aspects which I mentioned that a company should have in order to be successful, they had the otaku, they spread the word about their idea, and their doughnuts were tasty and they maintained the quality of each doughnut.

This is not a paid promotion :)

Click here to watch the TED talk by Seth Godin.